digital

The New Aesthetic is a new art meme, originally defined by James Bridle as a method of collecting materials which point towards an infatuation with the agency of computing. Although it has existed in it's current form since last year, it's sudden emergence has set off plenty of scholars, writers and artists into profuse flusters. But here's the question - can the new aesthetic be more than a meme? More to the point, does it want to be? Is it capable of a direction?

Gloria Maria Gallery is pleased to announce "Domesticated Mountain", a new project by Andreas Angelidakis, curated by Maria Cristina Didero.

Andreas Angelidakis is an architect who maintains an experimental practice in Athens, Greece, a studio involved in building, designing and speculating the contemporary ecosystem of screens and landscapes at the intersection of two systems: Art and Architecture, Virtual and Real, Building and Nature, Ruin and Construction. The medium Angelidakis uses is always some type of inhabitation, of buildings and spaces. These take the form of videos, computer animation, 3D prints and actual functional space. In recent years he has designed online communities, exhibition spaces (Athens Biennal, MUSAC, Fargfabriken), while writing, blogging and teaching.

"Domesticated Mountain" is a new project by Andreas Angelidakis narrating the story of citizens grewing up in an undefined suburbia. Their parents came there to avoid the noise and the pollution, chasing a post-fordist dream of life with a back yard and a double driveway, their home closer to nature. They had visions of mountains but now suburbia was just bundle of credit-card ruins, the post-fordist dream turned into neo-liberal nightmare. People never stopped buying, some of them forgot to throw away, or to pay. Now they could buy in their sleep, on a trip to Egypt, riding a camel, browsing the latest bargains on Uniqlo, lets get another cashmere blend sweater honey, even in the sweltering heat.

The internet changed the way they consumed, their palaces of shopping lay empty. Shopping malls were the Campo Marzio of the standard delivery generation. Nobody went there anymore, nobody knew what to do there. The suburbs became endless scrolls on our google earth, areas of continuous texture mapping, delivery addresses that matched the billing address, you only needed to remember your three digit security code.

Sometimes they forgot what they ordered within the hour of buying it, and sometimes bought it again. By the time it arrived nobody knew what it was or who had wanted it, so they put it in the pile of the other boxes waiting to be opened. The pile grew larger, soon they used the boxes to sit on, at first it was strange but the view was great. They fell asleep on their iPad screens, and things kept arriving. Before they knew it they were living on a mountain of purchases. This was the architecture of logistics, the post capitalist crisis of over consumption, the continuous flow of unnecessary acquisitions. They liked it here, so they decided to make their home, on the pile of impulse shopping and forgotten returns. Their home was a "Domesticated Mountain" of consumer logistics and desire.

In a series of workshops facilitated by Ele Carpenter and Emilie Giles Furtherfield invites all gallery visitors to take part in one or more Saturday morning embroidery sessions and come together to stitch a term from the Raqs Media Collective’s text ‘A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons’ (2003), chosen in relation to the specific theme of the Being Social exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery. Throughout March and April 2012.

Lexicon

A phrase for those moments when it seems that the whole world just wants artists to become coders. A reminder that there is plenty to be getting on with without addin g more code to this overcrowded...

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